Today’s One-Liner (#315)
Perhaps it is impossible to be unbeautiful when you’re happy. –David Grossman, Be My Knife, 11
Category: World Literature
Present Moment, Awesome Moment
Goethe once said that during eighty years of life he had known eleven happy days. I imagine that everyone, in the course of their life, must have seen many hundreds of sunrises and sunsets; they…
Time Management
The famous author of western stories, Louis L’Amour, wrote a very marvelous memoir called The Education of a Wandering Man. No book is better than this one for telling us how to find the time…
Essential and Limited
And there, indeed, is one of the great and marvelous features of beautiful books (and one which will make us understand the role, at once essential and limited, that reading can play in our spiritual…
Today’s One-Liner (#312)
[Y]ou know the greatest of all Balzac’s novels is Cousin Bette. –Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg, The Letters, 392
Today’s One-Liner (#310)
Everyone should read at one point in his life Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. –James Schall, S.J., A Student’s Guide to Liberal Learning, 34
Experience and Expectation
Let me also recall Samuel Johnson, whose famous biography by his devotee Boswell is, I think, something along with the Bible that you should read a bit every day, if only for the delight of…
Riveting
It’s good for me to be the citizen of a state in which there are eight and a half million prime ministers, eight and a half million prophets, and eight and a half million messiahs….
Chaos of the Now
Yet of Plutarch, the Ancilla to Classical Reading says, “He has indubitably had more European readers than any other pagan Greek and has been the greatest single channel communicating to Europe a general sense of…
Engagingly Readable
Dostoevsky is not a writer to struggle through or with, but one who tries to make his work as interesting and exciting—and as readable—as possible. His works raise some of the deepest moral and philosophic…